Discussing Collaboration - What should it look like?

Photo by UNDP photo stream. Retrieved from https://flic.kr/p/8z1MfS

I’d like to start today’s post with a short clip:

“The New York Public Library Has a Human Google”




In summary, It’s a video talking about a team of librarians at NYPL that will help users answer any researchable question they might have. They even discuss some of the more outlandish requests they have gotten and kept a record of them.

While it’s a meant to be a fun video, I think this is sometimes of the Teacher-librarian can be viewed by both staff and students - ask a question, get an answer - but there is definitely a lot more to the role. For students, building capacity and the knowledge of how to find an answer is equally, if not more important than assisting with an answer directly! For teachers, this could mean more in-depth collaboration discussions and longer “working relationships” in regards to a co-planned unit or assignment.

Collaboration has been an ongoing exploration for me in my library. While I have been doing some work in exploring our digital reference resources (as discussed in the Theme One post), currently, there are lots of requests for collaboration using some of the new technology we received as part of a district initiative (including robotics and other ADST materials).

These have been run multitude of different ways, but Callison’s definition of collaboration from Shayne Russell’s ERIC digest article has me rethinking how some of these learning opportunities should perhaps be formatted: collaboration is defined as “Each partner fulfills a carefully defined role; comprehensive planning is required; leadership, resources, risk, and control are shared; and the working relationship extends over a relatively long period of time” (Callison, 1999). I think perhaps because I am often the one initiating the collaboration, often it has fallen to me to construct what the core of the lesson looks like. While there are teacher to teacher discussions, it is often a short meeting; as discussed in the article - TLs with less overall flexible schedules tend to plan collaboratively for less time (Callison, 1999) - which I have been seeing in my own practice for better or for worse. However, I believe many teachers would absolutely be interested in going even further in-depth into a project or unit in the future. This is definitely something to think about! A carefully, collaboratively planned longer-term unit is perhaps a future goal for my library program.

Works Cited

Callison, D. (1999, January). Keywords in instruction: Collaboration. "School Library Media Activities Monthly," 15(5), 38-40. 

Great Big Story (2016, October 17). The New York Public Library Has a Human Google. Retrieved February 19, 2018, from https://youtu.be/PfqgDG1qrKg

Russell, S. (n.d.). Teachers and Librarians: Collaborative Relationships. ERIC Digest. Retrieved February 19, 2018, from https://www.ericdigests.org/2001-2/librarians.html

Scale of Space

Although it has a slightly hyperbolic title, "209 Seconds That Will Make You Question Your Entire Existence" is a video by Buzzfeed that gives a quick overview of the scale of objects in our universe. By doing quick comparisons that show the vast sizes and distances that exist in space, the video does a decent job of showing how big things really are:

http://safeshare.tv/w/IvlynCtHQz

Unfortunately there are some small inaccuracies pointed out by Phil Pliat in this article, but it is great as a jumping off point for a discussion about space.

(Thanks Gordon)

Linking to Youtube with a specific Start and End time

Sometimes it can be useful to be able to link to a specific part of a Youtube video. Luckily, it is possible to send a video link with a specific start and end time.

Linking a specific start time is very simple, and is actually built into the "share" function on the Youtube video page. Below the any given video, click on the "share" tab, then look for the "start at" check box:

When you share this link, the video will start at the specified time for the viewer.



Specifying an end time is a little bit trickier, since we need to add the start and end time to the URL ourselves.

Adding the end time only seems to work if you are using the embed link (NOT the share link). Navigate to the "embed" tab and you'll see a long line of HTML code. For example:

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/0Bmhjf0rKe8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>


Normally this line is for embedding the video into a webpage. Copy out the Youtube link from there (see example below).

www.youtube.com/embed/0Bmhjf0rKe8

To add the start and end time, we need to add it to the end of our Youtube link. Both the start and the end at counted in seconds, so a start time of 10 means it will start 10 seconds into the video, and a start time of 120 will start 2 minutes into the video. The format for this looks like this:

?start=10&end=15

Adding the above line to the end of our video link tells the website to start the video at 10 seconds in, and end it 15 seconds in. The full link would look like this.

www.youtube.com/embed/0Bmhjf0rKe8?start=10&end=15